Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites

An adventure of the Southern Appalachian Space Agency, by Travis Goodspeed <travis at radiantmachines.com>, as presented at Summercon 2013, inspired by the lectures of Adam Laurie and Jim Geovedi, with kind assistance from Skytee.

At Black Hat DC in 2008, I watched Adam Laurie present a tool for mapping Ku-band satellite downlinks, which he has since rewritten as Satmap. His technique involves using an DVB-S card in a Linux computer as a receiver through a 90cm Ku-band dish with fixed elevation and a DiSEqC motor for azimuth motion. It was among the most inspirational talks I’d ever seen, and I had a blast recreating his setup and scanning the friendly skies. However, such a rig is limited to geostationary satellites in a small region of the sky; I wanted to see the whole sky, especially the moving targets.
In this article, I’ll demonstrate a method for modifying a naval telecommunications dish to track moving targets in the sky, such as those in Low Earth Orbit. My dish happily sits in Tennessee, while I direct it using my laptop or cellphone here in Europe. It can also run unattended, tracking moving targets and looking for downlink channels.
 
For more detail: Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites